For some time now, the
simple extrapolation of a number of underlying socioeconomic trends has portended an
increasingly unattractive future for America. From 1973 to 1995, for example, average U.S.
wages fell 15 percent and family income stagnated, even while the number of two-income
households doubled. Crime and divorce rates soared, as did personal bankruptcies, and
perhaps most ominously, as U.S. News & World Report (Boroughs, 1996) notes, the gap
between the average incomes of the lowest-paid Americans and the best-paid widened
sharply, with the ratio between the average CEO's salary and the average workers
wages exploding in the 500 percent range!

Executive
Compensation

For the years 1973 through 1975, the ration between the average income of the CEOs of
ten Fortune 30 companies and the income of the average U.S. worker was 41:1. For the years
1993 through 1994, the ratio for the same ten companies' average CEO salaries to the
average U.S. workder had risen to 225:1 (a 450 percent increase).

Source: The Crystal Report, published by Graef Crystal, an executive
compensation expert, in Boroughs (1996).

The future implicit in these trendsone
in which U.S. society is dominated by a high-paid technocratic elite while the rest of us
(75 percent to 85 percent) are employed in low-value-adding service workhas become a
widely held expectation in American public opinion. By comparison, declining numbers of
Americans indicate that they believe in the postindustrial future long promised by
academics and corporate visionaries, in which high-tech tools, products, and services
engender entirely new forms of enterprise, leading to ever-higher levels of general
prosperity for all. For nearly a quarter-century, successive waves of computerization,
downsizing, and deregulation failed to improve either our productivity or our prosperity,
while the numbers of high-value-adding jobs in the United Statesincluding those
requiring four-year baccalaureate degreesdeclined as a share of all U.S. jobs. By
the late 1980s, the annual output of new college graduates was clearly exceeding workplace
demand, and the notion that the average person would be better off in a high-tech future
simply became less and less believable in the face of most people's experience ... until
now!

The Light at the End of the
Twentieth Century
One by one, over the past three years, essentially all the statistical indicators of our
twenty-year socioeconomic degradation have begun to reverse themselves. Average wages and
benefitsas well as average household incomeare now rising for all income
groups and ethnicities. What's more, rising productivity improvement rates mean
thatso farthe increased labor costs have not proven inflationary.
Simultaneously, welfare rolls have shrunk by about one-third, crime rates have dropped by
one-fourth, and divorce rates, teen pregnancy, and most recently, juvenile drug use are
all declining! For the nation's colleges and universities, the bounty of the new
prosperity is reflected by the fact that recruiters are back on campus.
All this good news has not been lost on
public opinion, which began to reflect a rising optimism in 1996. Indeed, at this moment,
it would be comfortable and convenient to assume that,

American enterprise is
finally back on track to a high-tech future in which essentially all high-value jobs will
require some form of postsecondary education.

after a decade or two of getting "lean and mean," American enterprise is
finally back on track to a high-tech future in which essentially all high-value jobs will
require some form of postsecondary education.
But U.S. enterprise has not merely been
getting leaner and meaner during the past twenty years, it's also been getting keener.
Specifically, it's been adopting new structures and practices to take advantage of the
unique value-adding capabilities of our rapidly maturing info-com technologies. And as our
private and public sector employers have increasingly undertaken productive new
organizational arrangements, several workplace trends have emerged in the United States
that are already having a profound impact on American workers and on educational
institutions seeking to prepare workers for the new workplace. These trends have, in fact,
long been forecast by the major futurists, notably Daniel Bell in The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society (1973), Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (1980), and
John Naisbitt in MegaTrends (1982). The fact that these long-range forecasts are
rapidly becoming universal realities is a measure of how far into the future we have come
in the past twenty-five years.

Info-com

Info-com is derived from a simple contraction of the words
INFOrmation and COMmunication, and is used here as many people use
"information," as in information revolution or information
technology. The productive power of electronic information systems does not rest
solely on the computer's capacity to assimilate large amounts of data in a moment; it also
rests on our newly gained ability to gather data and information from anywhere and
distribute it to anywhere instantaneously.

Trend #1: The Growing Contingent
Workforce
The social contract that promised job security in exchange for employee loyalty has been
broken. American companies continue to downsize, restructure, and lay off thousands of
workers. Work that is not considered to be part of the "core competency" of the
corporation is being outsourced or performed by temporary, part-time, or contract workers.
Today, there are twenty-eight million temporary workers in the United States, representing
over 20 percent of the workforceup more than 400 percent since 1980, when temps
represented only 4.5 percent of all workers (five million people). The upside to this
initially dismal trend is that, as the marketplace regularizes the use of contingent
workers throughout all levels of employment from the rank and file through professional
and managerial jobs to the executive suite, the pay and benefits of temporary workers have
rapidly begun to catch up to those of full-time wage earners over the past thirty-six
months.
If this trend continues, many
Americansby some estimates as much as half of the workforcewill be contingent
workers who will be employed in part-time, temporary, contract, or other nontraditional
employment within ten years. Many of these highly skilled workers will be self-employed
solo professionals. Meanwhile, the other half of the workforce will be employed in
full-time permanent jobs where they will be expected to behave as continuously adaptive,
self-developing team players in exchange for the benefits of career employment.

Trend #2: Flexplace Work
The number of employees who are telecommuting or working at nontraditional work sites such
as satellite offices has been growing at the rate of 20 percent or more per year
throughout most of this decade. Thanks to new technology and the changing nature of work
itself, fully 60 percent of the workforce today perform jobs for which physical location
is no longer critical. Already, one-third of American households have at least one person
performing compensated work at home for at least one day per week. The geographic
same-time-same-place workplace is being replaced by dispersed, anytime-anywhere workspace
networks. Within a few years, the phrase "going to work" will become meaningless
for most Americans. Work, for them, will be what they do, not the place they go to.

Trend #3: Upskilling of Jobs and
Workers
Practically all jobs are being "upskilled." The technical workforce is growing
in size and importance. Today, there are some 20 million technical workers in the United
States and one in four newly created jobs is technical. Workers with strong technical
skillslab technicians, computer professionals, drafters, paralegals, medical
technicians, designers, engineers, and so onare becoming the front-line workers of
most organizations. Even jobs that have not traditionally been considered technical
positions, such as the job of a courier, now have a strong technical component and require
the use of computers and other sophisticated electronic devices. At the same time, the
semiskilled and unskilled jobs that employed masses of illiterate or semiliterate workers
in the past are disappearing at a rapid pace.

Trend #4: Self-Managed Teams
Finally, we are seeing rapid growth in the use of cross-functional, multidisciplinary
teams with globally and ethnically diverse memberships. Already, one-third of American
companies with fifty or more employees have half or more of their employees working in
self-managed or problem-solving teams. Many of these teams have no traditional boss or
supervisor. Instead, team members take on responsibility for planning, organizing,
staffing, scheduling, directing, monitoring, and controlling their own work.

Fully 60 percent of the
workforce today perform jobs for which physical location is no longer critical.

Perhaps more important, these teams are increasingly linked via the Internet or other
global networks, with instantaneous and unrestricted flows of information within and
between teams and team members and among outside suppliers and customers. Charles Manz and
Henry Sims (1993), authors of Business Without Bosses, have estimated that 40
percent to 50 percent of the entire U.S. workforce will work in some type of empowered,
self-managed team by the year 2000 (p. 12).

Implications
Taken together, these four trends represent forces of truly transformational change in the
workplace, destined to dramatically alter the day-to-day content of most jobs, as well as
the traditional patterns of lifetime employment. These imminent changes, in turn, pose
powerful implications for every individual who enters the workplace, and for the
institutional processesfrom kindergarten to the college campusby which our
society prepares people for that workplace.

Implications for Individuals. To
succeed in the new workplace, workers will have to have the skills and abilities to add
value quickly. The new workplace will reward those "specialized generalists" who
have a solid basic education plus deep professional or technical skills in demand across a
range of companies and even industries. A solid basic education, as in the SCANS
competencies (The Secretarys Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1993), will
no longer be enough. Everyone will have to be able to do something that adds value
nowor be able to learn such value-adding skills quicklyto be considered for
employment in all but the most marginal twenty-first-century jobs. (An HR executive with a
Fortune 30 firm recently described liberal arts graduates as "literate, unskilled
recruits.")
While large employers (such as GM,
Lockheed Martin, or the armed services) will continue to provide their employees with
career counseling and retirement planning, most Americans will be responsible for managing
their own careers from now on. As Charles Handy has written, we will all need an
agentmuch as writers, actors, and sports figures have agents today. Temporary
staffing services, career counselors, and employment agencies in particular will rapidly
redefine their missions and marketing strategies to stress their role as agents in an
emerging human resources industry.
Since most Americans will not have
full-time permanent jobsand even those who do will have no real job
securitymost workers will be financially insecure. Americans will be forced to build
and maintain liquid savings equivalent to a year or more of income as a shield against
periods of unemployment or underemployment. Today's concept of retirement will all but
disappear, since most Americans will have to work through their sixties, just as we did
fifty years ago.
Meanwhile, the barrier that since the rise
of industrialization has separated work and the rest of life will be shattered. Work will
intrude into every aspect of life, and life will intrude on work. As a result, housing
will change dramatically. Homes will be wired for commerce as well as for recreation.
Houses and apartments will become both homes and work sites.
Essentially all employees will be expected
to demonstrate strong team skills and to have the ability to function effectively in a new
team from the start. Employers will no longer accept or tolerate six to twelve months of
"team building." Like a second- or third-string tail back, everyone from the
rank and file to the senior staff will be expected to come off the bench on short notice
and help the team gain yardage right away.
As we move increasingly to self-managed
teams, everyone will be expected to contribute to the team by performing one or more of
the following leadership roles:

Re:
"Sociolyzing"

While facilitating conveys much of what is intended here, the
word suffers from the same shortcoming that socializing does; the colloquial
understanding of both terms crucially misapprehends what is involved--that is, purposeful
but transparent intervention in a small group's dynamics by one or more members of that
group in such a way as to both facilitate and shape consensus.
The retention of the "y" to indicate
a conjunction between social and analyze describes a process developed
over years of practice and field application and reported in the literature on
"competent organizations." Elements of sociolyzing are crucial to the success of
all types of un-led small groups, including teams, civic and community organizations, and
neighborhood projects, that must function in an open, unstructured, egalitarian setting.
The practice is also reflected in successful online forums and symposia that involve
subtly interventionist "moderators," editors," or "fair
witnesses" who help naturally diverse participants discover consensus.
In the delayered, authoritative, collegial, and
collaborative social technologies that are now supplanting our old hierarchical,
compartmentalized, authoritarian, industrial bureaucracies, the principles and practices
of sociolyzation will replace the coerced social engineering of Taylorism.

Envisioning: facilitating idea generation and innovation in the team and helping
the team members think conceptually and creatively Organizing: helping the team focus on details, deadlines, efficiency, and structure
so the team gets its work doneSpanning: maintaining relationships with outside groups and people, networking,
presentation management, intelligence gathering, developing and maintaining a strong team
image, and locating and securing critical team resources
"Sociolyzing": uncovering the needs and concerns of individuals in the group,
ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to present his or her views, injecting humor
when it is needed to relieve tensions, taking care of the social and psychological needs
of group members

Since most teams will be cross-functional and many will be international, everyone will
require strong language skills (fluency in at least one language other than English) and
the ability to appreciate individual differences and to work effectively with people from
diverse cultures.

Implications for Organizations. Every
businessindeed every organization, whether public or private, profit or
nonprofitwill be forced to clarify its core competencies and reason for existence.
Those organizations, including educational institutions from K12 to grad schools,
that fail to identify and nurture what are truly their value-adding core activities risk
keeping the wrong things inside the organization while outsourcing those things that make
them unique and vital. By doing so, they will condemn themselves to becoming hollow,
unnecessary, untenable shells.

Since most teams will be
cross-functional and many will be international, everyone will require strong language
skills (fluency in at least one language other than English) and the ability to appreciate
individual differences and to work effectively with people from diverse cultures.

Traditional methods of management and
motivation, such as employee-of-the-month awards and the promise of a future promotion,
will be much less effective than they were just a few years ago. Highly skilled contingent
workers, in particular, will be more loyal to their disciplines than to their employer of
the moment. Threats of job loss will have little meaning to these workers, since they
expect no job security. Instead, these new workers will demand respect, interesting and
challenging work, the chance to develop their skills further, freedom and resources to use
their talents and knowledge to do the work they were hired to do and enjoy doing, and an
equitable share in the financial rewards that flow from their contribution.
As work is increasingly performed away
from the traditional work site, managers and supervisors will have to learn to manage
without depending so much on "face time" as a criterion of contribution.
Performance goals will become more explicit, and measurement will become more
sophisticated and objective. Results will count more than activities.
A key role of leaders of the new
organization will be to create a shared vision that both permanent and contingent
employees can grasp and commit to. We are building organizations that are, in reality,
enterprise constellations.

A key role of leaders of the
new organization will be to create a shared vision that both permanent and contingent
employees can grasp and commit to.

The gravity that holds the constellation of teams together and keeps them from spinning
out of control or colliding with each other will be the shared and unifying vision of who
we are. Without such a unifying vision and specific team goals and mission statements that
link teams to the overriding vision, there is perpetual conflict, competition for
resources, and misdirected energy.
Organizations will succeed or fail based
on the ability of their leadership to assemble teams with the right mix of talent quickly.
Just one missing technical or leadership skill can doom a team and the organization that
depends on its success to failure.

Implications for Educational
Organizations. As continuous lifelong learning becomes the norm, educational
institutions will be swamped with demand. The new studentsespecially adults in
midcareer transitionwill expect value, quality, speed of delivery, and effectiveness
in addition to availability and convenience. Education will be a critical personal
investment for which the consumer will demand an exceptionally high return. The sheer
scale, intensity, and diversity of demand for adult and continuing education, plus the
schooling of the Baby Boom Echo, will simply overwhelm our traditional instructional
systems and methods, requiring technology to play an increasingly important role in the
delivery of education. As schools assimilate new technology, the delivery of education at
all levels will become less labor intensive and more capital intensive. The majority of
education resources will no longer be devoted to salaries, but instead to software,
computers, multimedia equipment, and so on.
Info-com technology will, among other
things, free educational institutions from their current geographical boundaries. Fifty
percent or more of students at most postsecondary educational institutions (particularly
colleges and universities) will never set foot on the campus. Students will participate in
seminars with instructors and fellow students who are scattered across the continent, and
take tutorials from scholars on the far side of the planet. Already some six hundred
college-level courses are being offered via the Internet and new courses are being added
every day. Within a few years, tens of thousands of such courses will be available to
anyone with access to the Internet.
The trend toward hiring part-time and
temporary faculty will continue and accelerate, mirroring developments in government and
industry. Fully 38 percent of faculty members work part time today; half will be
part-timers within five years or less.
And not only will info-com free
educational institutions from their geographical boundaries, it will also free educators
from educational institutions. The most highly skilled teachers will sell their courses to
national and international education packagers and virtual universities. Rather than
seeking the security of tenure, these skilled instructors will become "knowledge
entrepreneurs," selling their knowledge to a global mass market.

The most highly skilled
teachers will sell their courses to national and international education packagers and
virtual universities.

A few will gain international recognitionand, in a world thirsty for knowledge,
will command fees rivaling those of highly paid athletes and entertainers.
As a consequence of the explosion in
pedagogical info-preneurship, students will have access to a limitless variety of courses.
Eventually, almost every course taught anywhere in the world will be available to anyone
who has access to inexpensive hardware and software. Students will be able to construct
their own unique curriculum with courses taught by internationally recognized experts in
each field.
Micro-niche knowledge markets will
develop. Any course, any subject matterno matter how nontraditional or narrowly
focusedwill find an audience in what will become a vast global educational
marketplace. Educational consumer rating services will review and rate educational
offerings much the way they now review and rate movies, books, and music.
As technology shatters geographic
educational boundaries, it will shift the locus of power over education content. Local and
regional educators and public policymakers will lose out to national and international
educational impresarios, who will produce and distribute their courses directly to
students on an international basis. Students will gain power through choice, their course
selections no longer mediated by local or regional policymakers.
Meanwhile, teachers of some subjects will
become endangered species. Today tens of thousands of teachers are employed to provide
basic instruction in core subjects such as

Students will be able to
construct their own unique curriculum with courses taught by internationally recognized
experts in each field.

introductory language, history, biology, math, and so on. New multimedia educational
technology will make it possible for a few hundred of the most skilled teachers to provide
the instruction of several thousand.
Finally, within the next five years,
three-quarters of new Ph.D.'sup from one-half todayespecially in such fields
as engineering and chemistry, will forgo an academic career for employment in the private
sector. This migration of Ph.D.s to business is being driven by a combination of
forces including government cutbacks in funds for basic research, tighter restrictions on
granting of tenure (or the elimination of tenure entirely), and an increased demand for
employees with graduate training to conduct applied research in the private sector.
As the demand for employees with
graduate-level expertise increases in the private sector, universities and colleges will
be under significant pressure to drastically reduce the time to degree for graduate
students, particularly Ph.D. candidates, and to supply graduates who can effectively
communicate complex technical knowledge to nonspecialists and can work well in teams.

The Greatest Implication of All. With
every passing month, the accumulating economic indicators make it clear that the United
States has just passed through a historic inflection point in the information revolution.
The primary focus of corporate America is no longer the dismantling of our old industrial
institutions,

Three-quarters of new
Ph.D.'s will forgo an academic career for employment in the private sector.

but rather the creation and staffing of high-value-adding info-mated operations. Major
U.S. employers are currently creating almost twice as many new jobs each year as they are
eliminating, and 60 percent of all new jobs are offering above-average wages. Taken
together, the ongoing changes in both the nature of work and the structure of employment
foreshadow not just change but a seismic quake; a quantum shift in our very understanding
of what it means to work, learn, and live.
The American economyand
societyare about to experience a wave of change that will crash upon us with a force
we have never known before. For higher education, this will mean dramatic changes in the
requirements that graduates will be expected to meet, and in the makeup and needs of the
postsecondary student population. It will also mean revolutionary innovations in the ways
that colleges and universities deliver their services and how they organize themselves to
develop products to meet new marketplace demands. Many who read this article will see this
wave of change as frightening. But it does not have to be viewed that way.

Major U.S. employers are
currently creating almost twice as many new jobs each year as they are eliminating.

In fact, for all the loss and risk our collective future portends, it also offers
unparalleled opportunity. In a very real sense, for higher education, for America, and for
humankind, the light at the end of the twentieth century is the limitless promise of the
twenty-first century.

References
Bell, D. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting New
York: Basic Books, 1973.